1. Lay 4 tortillas on a clean surface. Spread with tomato salsa and sprinkle with half the grated cheese.

2. Top each one evenly with kidney beans, grated carrot and spinach leaves. Sprinkle with remaining grated cheese. Cover with the remaining 4 tortillas.

3. Heat a large non-stick frying pan and grease with cooking spray. Add one filled tortilla, cook over a medium heat for about 3 minutes or until golden underneath. Using an egg slide, carefully turn and cook other side until golden. Remove from pan.

4. Repeat step 3 with remaining filled tortillas to make 4 quesadillas. Cool then cut each into 6 wedges.

5. Mash avocado with lemon juice in a small bowl. Serve with quesadillas if desired.

Tip: These tasty quesadillas can also be eaten warm as an after school snack or served as a light dinner with a salad.

This menu is a challenge by choice menu, meaning that we encourage our learners to eat a variety of foods, whilst ensuring dependable and consistent food choices.

A goal for 2016 is to have family input as much as we can, if you have suggestions of special foods that your family eats that you feel would be beneficial to LCK please talk to either the educators in your room or the Kitchen Staff.

For further information about our menu or what the NSW Health Guidelines entail please ask, we are always encouraged by families enquiring about nutrition!!

 Joel and Catherine

Book & App reviews

Store all of your children’s beautiful art work this year easily and without the clutter! Below are a few of the great apps out there for storing artwork and more.

Never again feel guilty about throwing away artwork your kids bring home. They will love flipping through their Artkives to see their creations. The simple interface allows easy sharing with family and friends.

With Keepy it's easy to keep everything organized, and in just minutes you can turn your kids' creations into the perfect gift. Share them with the grandparents or keep them for your kids

Canvsly is a private platform that helps parents capture, organize, share their children's precious artwork, creative moments so they can cherish them anytime, anywhere forever.

Welcome the Sandcastles Room for 2016!!!!

We are very excited to welcome all our existing and new families back to the room for 2016, we have big things planned for the year and we would love any feedback and ideas for the room.

You may have noticed that our room has changed around and the lockers have moved to the other end, what do you think? The children have been loving having more space to play and spread out and we love how it looks.

Have you heard about Kinderloop?? If you haven’t, please speak with one of the Sandcastle Room Educators and they will be able to show you how to sign up. If you have signed up for Kinderloop, please have a look and let us know what you think! Feel free to comment on any of the posts about your child or the room, and let us know what you think or any follow on ideas that you may have.

Have you seen our new Sandcastles family tree??

If you haven’t received a Welcome to the Sandcastles Room 2016 sheet yet please see one of the educators, we would love your input and your family photo to add to our family tree. The children have been loving pointing their photos out to their peers and it has been a great way to help the children feel comfortable and to develop a sense of belonging in the Sandcastles Room.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for us we would love to hear them!!

Brony, Rachel, Jaimee, Petrea and Grace.

Starfish News

We want to extend a warm welcome (or welcome back) to all our families. We've had a busy start to the year, and are still working to find the best way to help each child settle in best. Our belonging wall & family photos have been a wonderful help so far, giving children a connection to loved ones and a way to discuss how they're feeling when emotions overwhelm or get in the way. In saying that, many children have settled in beautifully and are building strong trusting relationships with their peers and educators.

We hope you are enjoying Kinderloop the way that we are. It has made sharing information faster & easier. Did you know that you can post on it too? We love to hear your feedback and stories too! In fact, we would like to incorporate some of your goals into our curriculum over the next few months... So please let us know something you'd like us to achieve or develop with your child and we will endeavour to work toward it. We will also display these near our belonging poster.

The children are currently loving our dress up space, and also our outdoor

easel. We aim to keep our learning environments engaging and meeting the

changing needs and interests of the children. We hope you like it too.

Cass, Ashleigh, Bek & Catherine

The Starfish Team.

Health & Safety: Separation Anxiety

By Mali Anderson

Does your little one cry or cling to you or both as you're leaving the room or heading out the door? Your toddler may be experiencing separation anxiety. At this age, your child doesn't have a strong sense of time, so he doesn't know when you'll return. Learn how to identify signs of toddler separation anxiety in order to soothe away the tears.

Why Do Toddlers Experience Separation Anxiety?

Children go through feelings of separation anxiety for different reasons, but on a basic level, they believe their survival is dependent on having a primary caregiver close by. Toddlers are also still too young to understand the concept of time. Leaving them in a room for a few minutes or at day care for a few hours feels like the same amount of time for them. So instead of sneaking off, which a toddler can interpret as leaving forever, be sure to say adieu, but keep the parting simple and short. Try to convey that the time apart is temporary and is not a cause for alarm.

What Are the Signs of Separation Anxiety?

Anxiety is "typically most prevalent between 8 and 18 months or so." Erin Boyd-Soisson, Ph.D. Indications of separation anxiety are usually present while a caregiver is departing or has left. Children may cling, throw a tantrum, or resist other caregivers in an

attempt to convince the parent not to leave, whether for work or to run an errand. A child can also show signs of fear and restlessness when a parent is in another room, when he's left alone at bedtime, or is being dropped off at day care. The outbursts usually subside once the caregiver is out of view. "This anxiety serves to keep the child close to the caregiver, who is their source of love and safety," Dr. Boyd-Soisson says.

How Can You Ease Separation Anxiety?

Although it may be difficult to hear a child cry, remember that separation anxiety does have a positive aspect: It indicates that a healthy attachment has bonded a caregiver and child. Try talking a child through the process of leaving; tell him that you love him and let him know you will return. If it helps, offer him a favorite stuffed animal as a soother in your absence. Keeping a regular routine can help children develop a feeling of control over daily situations. Say "See you later, alligator" or share a secret handshake as a clear and consistent indicator when saying goodbye.

News from the Seashells Room!

What a wonderful start to the year it has been for the Seashell's room!! Welcome to all our new and wonderful families and welcome back to our beautiful families from last year.

We have done so much already this year and we are excited to see what the rest of the year brings. We are so proud of how well our new babies have settled and we just love the atmosphere of the room!

We would just like to remind you to please bring hats and drink bottles for your children, apply sunscreen in the mornings and make your child's cot upon drop off. This just enables us to give more attention to your beautiful children.

If you haven't already noticed please check out our belonging mind map, just near our lockers. This mind map is about helping the children to feel a sense of belonging and comfortability in the room and to the group.

We have photos up on the wall of the children with their regular drop-off family member so that throughout the day they can see a familiar face. We have also added pictures of popular locations to see what the children's interests are so that we can connect with our community. We would love it if you could email us a family photo of you at your child's favourite place or activity, for example at the beach, farm, pool, shops and park.

To extend on these interests in the next few months we will be doing some artworks based on items from the locations, so for beach we will be making sea creatures out of recycled bottles and sand. For the farm, with the help of our wonderful maintenance man Graham, together we plan to make a scarecrow for our garden.

We value your input and we as a seashell room would love to work closely

with our families to ensure our children are receiving the best in quality

care and learning.

Lots of love Nicole, Emma and Catherine

What preschool means in Sweden

Most people have heard that Finland leads the world in education, but fewer have heard that Finland’s neighbour, Sweden, is the international leader in early childhood education and care.

In Sweden, the minister of gender equality is responsible for preschool. We do not distinguish between childcare and preschool. Instead, we have chosen to combine early childhood education and childcare in what we call the Educare model. Preschools thus have dual functions: to enable parents to combine parenthood with work or studies and to encourage children’s development and learning.

In our system, municipalities are obliged to provide preschool for children from the age of 1, not only when parents are working or studying, but also when they are unemployed or on a leave of absence. In the latter cases, children are entitled to at least 3 hours per day or 15 hours every week. In addition to this, all children receive at least 525 hours per year free of charge, beginning from the fall when the child reaches the age of 3.

Most preschools are open from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The current government has also invested in providing preschool for children during nights, weekends and holidays because many parents do not have the choice to work 9 to 5, and the preschools need to be able to cater to the needs of these families.

Fees are directly proportional to the parents’ income and inversely proportional to the number of children in a family. The fee can be up to 3 percent of a family’s monthly income, but must never exceed 1,260 Swedish krona, or $196, per month.

The result of our efforts is that 94 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 5 are enrolled in the system. Indeed, Educare is a fundamental component of our welfare system and a cornerstone in our struggle for gender equality. Without preschools, we would not have among the highest female and maternal employment rates in the European Union, or the lowest levels of child poverty.

Source: The New York Times - Miriam Nordfors is the political adviser to Sweden’s minister of gender equality, who oversees all issues related to childcare and early education.

Hi from the Dolphins!

Our Dolphin leaders from last year would like to welcome all of the Sandcastles who graduated to become Dolphins this year. We would also like to welcome Bailey, Hannah and Charlotte A-B to Little Coasties and our Dolphin group.

This year we have had a slight change to our daily routine. It incorporates intensive group times to prepare for big school. We welcome you to chat with Gabe, Sasha F or Phoebe for an explanation of our changes.

Hopefully your clever children have been talking about the letter 'S' that we have been discovering in our room, and telling you the sound it makes. Phonetic awareness is one of the groups that we have introduced this year as a part of our intentional teaching strategies. Throughout the year we will be introducing letter sounds and matching it with the name of that sound. Please let us know if any Dolphins mention these at home.

Name writing is a big focus for the Dolphins in preparation for school and we are currently creating name cards with photos for the children to use as a guide card to write their name at preschool. This also promotes independence and a sense of identity.

Another way in the children gaining a sense of identity is through family. We ask everyone to bring in a photo of their family to add to our family tree display we are creating.

Hopefully you have all joined Kinderloop and are enjoying the daily posts. We are intending for this to be a way of communicating the sounds we are working on and the interests the children have that we are developing. We would love some feedback on our Kinderloop posts.

Thank you,

Gabe, Sasha, Phoebe, Sara, Kate and Sacha.

Did you know…?

Literacy can be presented in many different forms! The humble hard-cover story book is only the beginning!

We can present literacy ideas in many ways…. And in addition, one of the most challenging parts of a young pre-schoolers day is that they get tired!!

We have decided to explore the idea of utilising literature in its digital form as an invitation for our Dolphin children to Stop, Rest and Relax.

Please check in with any of our Dolphin teachers to find out more

SUSTAINABILITY CORNER

Hi to all our Little Coasties families, old and new. This year I have been appointed the role of outdoor room leader. As I have only recently completed my Primary/Early Childhood degree, I am very excited to put my four years of study into practice. We are working on many new ideas for our outdoor learning space that will be implemented over coming months, and aim to engage and excite everyone!

Last week we introduced our new morning tea routine, which involves spending most of the morning between indoor and outdoor areas, and sharing a progressive morning tea with Dolphins and Sandcastles. This introduction of choice within play means that children can eat when they are ready and we don’t need to interrupt their play. Please be assured that we will encourage every child to eat during the morning tea time, even if it’s just a quick piece of fruit and glass of milk.

So far the children seem to be enjoying the change and the freedom to choose between indoor or outdoor play all morning, weather permitting of course!

We are incorporating our outdoor learning areas more this year, I would like to remind all families to please pack a hat in your child’s bag every day, and to apply sunscreen when you arrive each morning. The educators will reapply in the afternoon, ensuring your children are protected from the sun whilst at pre-school!!

Please come say hi if you see me in the yard! --- Jaimee

Categories

Parent Reviews

Thanks for another great year. We appreciate all you do in helping us to look after and encourage Mitchell to be the best he can be. We know you are all a special part of our family - David, Sarah, Emily and Mitchell

A little something to say a very big thankyou for the services you provide for us as parents and our children. Your care and compassion surpasses all. The atmosphere of kindy and the skills of all the staff ensure my children have a wonderful learning experience all day. Keep up the hard work - the Ellis Family

Our family only joined your family this year, but what a year Tuscany has had, Through your education, teaching, fun and care Tuscany is now ready for school. Your centre and staff is always professional, and your program always relevant. We have loved every minute of it. We thankyou you all for your commitment to your job and bringing your warm personality to everything you do. - Canone Family